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Del Mar Wine + Food Festival 2026 — Grand Tasting

Coming Soon

44 Gathering

6h away

Del Mar Wine + Food Festival 2026 — Grand Tasting

Today · Oct 3 – Oct 4 Varies — see delmar.wine for current packages 14989 Via De La Valle, Del Mar, CA…

The best conversation you will have at a tasting is with a winemaker who poured for you a while ago and is still standing there, because nobody else has walked up yet. That happens here more than it should. An open field near the racetrack, ocean air coming over the top of it, more than fifty producers pouring alongside chefs who cook in this county all year and almost never stand shoulder to shoulder like this. Coastal California, Baja, and enough from further afield to reset your sense of what a region can taste like. A full week of smaller dinners and chef collaborations leads into it, so by the weekend the whole food community is already deep in one long conversation and you are simply joining late. Via De La Valle in Del Mar, two days in early October, packages for one day or both. If your way into this world is the food and not the wine, come anyway. Nobody here is going to quiz you.

Coming Soon

65 Gathering

6h away

Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest 2026

Today · Oct 3 – Oct 25 42900 Big Bear Blvd, Big Bear Lake…

At 6,752 feet, the mountain air turns crisp enough in October that a full beer hall in the forest starts to feel less like a party and more like the reason the season exists. Every October weekend, Big Bear throws its Oktoberfest at the Big Bear Convention Center, and the fall foliage and the elevation do the work that no lowland festival can fake. German beer on draft, brats, pretzels, sauerkraut, Bavarian desserts. Live oompah bands play through the day. Stein-holding contests, chicken-dance competitions, and a full dance floor run from early afternoon into the night, and there are no reservations to make - you show up, grab a stein, and join in. It runs Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays across all four October weekends. One warning: mountain traffic on the 18 and 138 stacks up on Saturday afternoons, so arrive early or late. Big Bear Village and the surrounding forest hit peak fall color in October, which makes this an easy excuse to turn one afternoon into a full weekend in the mountains.

Weekly

6h away

Del Mar Farmers Market

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 Free 1050 Camino Del Mar, Del Mar, CA 9…

Noon is a strange hour for a farmers market, and it turns out to be exactly the right one. Late enough that you have had a proper morning already. Early enough that you are home again before the coastal traffic thickens and ruins the rest of the afternoon. The vendors are local in the literal sense — farms and producers from inside the county, selling whatever is genuinely in season rather than a standardized inventory trucked in from three states away. That specificity is the entire difference between a certified market and a produce aisle with nicer lighting. And it stays small enough that you learn the faces over a season. The honey vendor. The bread baker. The flower grower who arrives with whatever happened to be blooming that week. Eventually you stop going for groceries and start going because it is Saturday and the market is open, which is reason enough. Take somebody with you and make it a standing thing.

NAIJA Fest '26 — Los Angeles (Grand Park)

Coming Soon

18 Gathering

6h away

NAIJA Fest '26 — Los Angeles (Grand Park)

Today · Oct 3 Gloria Molina Grand Park, 200 N Gr…

The bass drops before you clear the entrance. Not a sound system warming up — the DJ is already three tracks deep into an Afrobeats set that turns heads from the fountain to the steps, and the crowd is moving the way a crowd moves when the music isn't background. It's the floor. NAIJA Fest is the largest Nigerian Independence Day celebration in the United States, and it lives at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles — free and open to everyone, because that's the only way to throw a party that sounds like home for people whose home is an ocean away. Mr. P and King Kanja headline. The food stalls run suya and jollof and puff puff in volumes that mean the line is long and nobody minds. This isn't a concert with a culture theme. It's a culture with a concert inside it. The fashion show is real fashion — Lagos and Accra designers whose clothes move differently under California light. And the crowd is the point: diaspora and curious and everyone in between, celebrating an independence that belongs to a country but resonates with anyone who has ever felt far from the place that made them. October 3, 12–7 PM. Gloria Molina Grand Park. Free.

Weekly

26 Gathering

7h away

Big Bear Lake Oktoberfest 2026

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 Big Bear Lake Convention Center, 4…

Up at 6,750 feet the beer comes with a mountain view and absolutely no chill whatsoever. Big Bear's Oktoberfest has been running for over fifty years, which means the whole thing operates like a well-oiled Bavarian machine: the log-sawing contests, the stein-holding endurance battles, oompah bands flown in from actual Germany, and a hall full of flatlanders discovering that yes, they will in fact do the chicken dance in front of three hundred strangers. It runs weekend after weekend all through the fall, so it becomes the excuse to finally make the mountain trip you keep putting off, alpine air and a giant soft pretzel and a designated driver who is being a very good sport about all of this. The lake sits right there for a cold, gold-lit walk between rounds when the beer hall finally gets too warm and loud. Bring a group and lederhosen you're not afraid to fully commit to. It fills the Convention Center in Big Bear Lake across nine weekends of autumn.

Coming Soon

221 Gathering

8h away

221

Taste of Oceanside 2026

Today · Oct 3 MainStreet Oceanside, 330 N Coast …

The best way to learn a neighborhood is to eat your way across it without a map — just a passport booklet in your hand and the vague instruction to follow whatever smells best. That is what happens to downtown Oceanside for one afternoon. The coastal stretch between Coast Highway and the pier turns into a walking food tour, and somewhere around the fourth stop it lands on you that you have been driving past fifty restaurants for years without ever once pulling over. Over fifty of them open their doors, and you move at your own pace. Shuttles loop the district for anyone who would rather ride, or whose third tasting hit harder than expected. MainStreet runs it because they know the food is not really the product. The product is walking into a place you never noticed, tasting something that makes you close your eyes, and knowing already that you are coming back next week with someone who needs this. Bring that someone now and skip a step.

Coming Soon

8h away

Rancho BEERnardo Festival 2026

Today · Oct 3 Webb Park, Rancho Bernardo, San Di…

There's a neighborhood in the northern reaches of San Diego where the Rotary Club figured out a long time ago that the fastest way to raise money for local charity programs is to put seventy-five breweries in a park and let the zip code drink its way through a Saturday afternoon. The Rancho BEERnardo Festival is not a beer expo. It's not a craft beer launch party. It's a backyard party that outgrew every backyard in Rancho Bernardo and landed in Webb Park — a grass-and-shade setting where the tasting pours come from local breweries who are pouring because their taproom regulars are already here. Seventy-five-plus tastings including craft beer, wine, spirits, and new this year, mocktails. Photo booths. Games that only make sense after your fourth pour. Music that knows it's background music and doesn't fight it. All of it benefits local charity programs through the Rancho Bernardo Sunrise Rotary Club, so every overpour has a purpose. Fourteenth year. The formula hasn't changed because it doesn't need to. 21+ only. October 3, 2–5 PM (VIP at 1). Webb Park, Rancho Bernardo.

Weekly

8h away

Hallowe'en Spooktacular

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 Bob Baker Marionette Theater, 1345…

There is a particular panic to finding something for a five-year-old in October that is actually Halloween and not a trauma. Everything is either a hayride with a cartoon pumpkin or a maze with a man holding a chainsaw. The middle does not seem to exist. It does, on a stretch of 1st Street, and it has existed since 1963. Bob Baker's marionettes are hand-built, string-operated, and operated in the open — the puppeteers walk the floor with them, so the whole thing happens at eye level with the audience sitting on carpet rather than in rows. More than a hundred puppets come out across the show: dancing skeletons, a pumpkin patch, a sea of ghosts. It is spooky the way a children's book is spooky, which is to say genuinely, and without anybody jumping out at you. The detail that converts adults: every show ends with ice cream, and the costume parade is for everyone in the room, not just the kids. Plenty of the audience on a given afternoon has no child with them at all. Runs through November 8. 1345 West 1st Street, Los Angeles. Tickets move quickly once October starts, and the people who know this place book the whole month in one go.

Padres Postseason Watch Party — NLDS Game 1 at Gallagher Square

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19 Gathering

10h away

Padres Postseason Watch Party — NLDS Game 1 at Gallagher Square

Today · Oct 3 ✨ New Gallagher Square at Petco Park, 10…

Road playoff games have a geography problem. Your team plays the most important night of its year and you are four states from the noise, taking it in off a screen in a quiet room, alone with every pitch. So they open the lawn. Five dollars puts you on the grass behind the outfield wall with a few thousand people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same moment, which turns out to be most of what anybody wanted. The board at the Sycuan Stage runs seventy-five feet across. The playground stays open for the kids who do not care yet, and anyone under three feet tall gets in free. The five dollars is barely a price anyway — the net proceeds go to the Padres Foundation. Gallagher Square at Petco Park, 100 Park Boulevard. Gates open an hour before the 5:30 first pitch. The whole city does this together or it does not do it at all.

El Cajon Oktoberfest 2026 — German American Societies

Daily

112 Gathering

11h away

112

El Cajon Oktoberfest 2026 — German American Societies

Every day · Next Oct 3 German American Societies, 1017 S …

Two weekends. One biergarten. And a crowd that takes its oompah seriously. El Cajon Oktoberfest is San Diego County's most traditional German celebration — run by the German American Societies at their clubhouse on Mollison Avenue since before most of the microbreweries in North Park existed. Authentic German beers on tap, classic bratwurst and desserts, a live OomPah band that knows every verse of 'Ein Prosit,' folk dancers in lederhosen, a bustling vendor area, a kids' zone, and the kind of contests and raffles that only make sense after your third stein. Two full weekends: September 25-27 and October 2-4, 2026. German American Societies Clubhouse, 1017 S Mollison Ave, El Cajon, CA 92020. This is not a brewery pop-up with a pretzel plate. This is the real thing — the kind your grandparents would recognize — in a biergarten that's been pouring since before craft beer was a category. Bring the dirndl. Bring the appetite. Leave the car.

San Diego Sustainable Night Market at AleSmith

Monthly

48 Gathering

12h away

San Diego Sustainable Night Market at AleSmith

Monthly · Next Oct 3 AleSmith Brewing Co., 9990 AleSmit…

Most eco-markets are a card table of soap outside a grocery store, and everybody knows it. This one is inside a brewery with fire pits and ax throwing, which sounds like a mismatch until you are standing in the yard on a Friday with a beer, listening to somebody explain their supply chain because you asked. Twenty-odd vendors, vetted rather than assembled: zero-waste food, organic and locally sourced goods, refillables, clothing where the seller can tell you exactly where each part of it came from. Not the performative kind. The kind that gets more specific the harder you push. The full house lineup of ales and lagers is on tap, the outdoor space is lit, and you move through the stalls at your own pace instead of in a queue. First Friday of every month on AleSmith Court, free to walk in. Bring the friend who reads every label and has never had anywhere good to do it.

Coming Soon

12h away

Ontario Reign 2026-27 Opening Night

Today · Oct 3 Toyota Arena, 4000 Ontario Center …

The best night out in the Inland Empire costs less than parking at a Kings game, and you do not have to sit in freeway traffic to reach it. Nobody outside the IE seems to have noticed yet. Opening night is the season at its most hopeful: the lights, the anthem, the first hit that rattles the glass and reminds the whole building what it came for. The roster is stocked with the players the Kings are developing, which means the kid you watch tonight might be scoring in a different sweater by spring, in front of a crowd that never saw him do it here first. Toyota Arena in early October, families and diehards in the same rows, seats near the ice available to anyone who wants them. Take the kids. Then take credit forever for knowing his name before anybody else did.

Coming Soon

12h away

Anamanaguchi, Covet, sueter7

Today · Oct 3 Quartyard, 1301 Market St, San Die…

The sound of a Nintendo chip is not nostalgia for everybody. For a certain kind of person it is the sound of being eight years old, alone in a room where nothing bad was happening, and hearing it played loud by four people on a stage does something complicated to the chest. Anamanaguchi run their music through a hacked NES. Not an emulator and not a plugin — the actual hardware, the physical chip, wired into a live band with guitar and drums stacked on top. They wrote the score for the Scott Pilgrim video game, which is how most people found them, and they have spent every year since proving the chiptune was never a novelty. Covet co-headline, and Yvette Young's fretboard-tapping instrumentals drag in a completely different crowd — math rock kids who came to study technique and end up dancing anyway. Those two audiences almost never share a floor. That is the reason to go. Downtown at 13th and Market, doors at six on Saturday the third. All ages.

Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-N-Fire 2026 — Long Beach Arena

Daily

12h away

Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-N-Fire 2026 — Long Beach Arena

Every day · Next Oct 3 Long Beach Arena, 300 E Ocean Blvd…

Your kid has been sleeping with a Mega Wrex toy for six months. They don't know it's 40 feet tall in real life. They're about to find out. Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live Glow-N-Fire turns the Long Beach Arena into something between a concert and a demolition — blacklights, pyrotechnics, car-crushing robots, and trucks the size of your apartment launching off ramps while the floor shakes. Mega Wrex, Tiger Shark, Bone Shaker, Bigfoot, and the new Rhinomite all compete in a bracket that your five-year-old will take more seriously than any playoff game you've ever watched. The FMX riders perform between rounds — flipping motorcycles in the dark while fire shoots from the stage — and the whole thing is loud enough that your kid will talk about it for weeks in a way that makes every other parent at school jealous. October 3–4, 2026. Saturday 6:30 PM, Sunday 1:30 PM. Long Beach Arena, 300 E Ocean Blvd, Long Beach 90802. Available through Ticketmaster.

Chris Botti - Champagne Jazz at Thornton Winery

Coming Soon

36 Gathering

13h away

Chris Botti - Champagne Jazz at Thornton Winery

Today · Oct 3 $95+ Thornton Winery, 32575 Rancho Cali…

Close your eyes during a Chris Botti solo and you could swear you are in a Manhattan jazz club at one in the morning, except the air smells like crushed grapes and the ceiling is the actual sky. Botti is the best-selling American instrumental artist of his generation, a Grammy winner who spent years playing trumpet behind Sting before his own name got that big, and his tone does something specific to a room. People who announce that they do not like jazz go quiet mid-sentence. He plays Thornton's terrace on the first Saturday of October, the vineyard already turning toward harvest, the estate sparkling wine poured through dinner service. Of all fourteen nights in this series, the regulars circle his first. Twenty minutes up the freeway and you are as close to a great concert hall as this valley gets. Buy the seat now and thank yourself in autumn, sitting next to whoever you would most want there.

Carlsbad Strawberry Company Haunted Corn Maze 2026

Weekly

23 Gathering

13h away

Carlsbad Strawberry Company Haunted Corn Maze 2026

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 1050 Cannon Rd, Carlsbad, CA 92008

During the day, the Carlsbad Strawberry Company is the kind of place where you take your kids to pick strawberries and pet a goat. On Friday and Saturday nights in October, the lights go out and the corn maze — the same one that felt wholesome and sunny six hours ago — becomes a 30-acre gauntlet of scare actors, themed rooms, and the particular terror of being lost in a crop that is taller than you are while something you cannot see makes a sound you cannot identify. Over 30 live scare actors work the maze, and the jump scares are real enough that the screams carry across Cannon Road to the neighbors who have learned to close their windows in October. The entry fee includes the adrenaline spike and the right to pretend you did not grab your friend's arm. Teens and adults only for the haunted version. Every Friday and Saturday in October, 7 PM to 10 PM. The regular family-friendly corn maze and pumpkin patch run daily during the day.

San Diego Summer Movies in the Park 2026

Weekly

40 Gathering

13h away

San Diego Summer Movies in the Park 2026

Every Saturday · Next Oct 3 Free Waterfront Park, 1600 Pacific Hwy,…

Grass under a blanket, somebody's dog wandering the row, and a kid down front narrating the plot to nobody in particular. Half the neighborhood is out here and not one of them paid anything to be. Somebody decided that every part of this city deserved at least one summer evening of a movie outdoors under an actual sky, and then went and did it, park by park, year after year. The format is the whole idea: find the screening closest to you, bring something to sit on, arrive before dark. No seats to reserve, no venue with opinions about your shoes. Just a park turning into a theater for a few hours because people wanted somewhere good to be. The lineup runs wide enough that something is always worth the trip — a recent release, an old one, something the kids have not seen. Rotating locations from July into October, free. Find the one nearest you and tell your neighbors. That is genuinely all it takes.

Show Me the Body with The Whispers and Jivebomb

Coming Soon

109 Gathering

15h away

109

Show Me the Body with The Whispers and Jivebomb

Today · Oct 3 $57+ The Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood …

Hardcore was never really about the music so much as the room — the sweat, the pile of bodies, the strange tenderness of a hundred alienated kids catching each other mid-air. Show Me the Body took that ethos and made it stranger and heavier, banjo run through a distortion pedal, industrial clang and blunt-force noise, a New York band that built an actual community around being loud and unwanted together. Live at the Fonda, it is chaos with a conscience: a pit that will spit you out and pick you back up, a crowd that treats the show like a meeting of a congregation nobody else would have. The Whispers and Jivebomb bring the heaviness early. This is for the kids who never fit the other rooms. Saturday, October 3, 2026, 9pm, Hollywood. Come throw yourself in and find out that the loudest, ugliest room in town is somehow also the one that will catch you.

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